President Donald Trump looks on as he exits Air Force One on his arrival at Palm Beach International Airport in West Palm Beach, Florida, January 31, 2026. REUTERS/Nathan Howard
President Donald Trump made the second major firing of his current administration this week, with one GOP insider revealing to The Hill the "largest failure" that led to their ouster.
On Thursday, Trump made it official via Truth Social post that Pam Bondi was being removed from her position as attorney general, stating only that she would be heading off to a job in the private sector. Todd Blanche, Trump's one-time personal defense lawyer and deputy attorney general under Bondi, was elevated to interim AG in her wake as the president weighs a proper replacement.
In a report published Friday morning, The Hill spoke with an anonymous GOP strategist who revealed the major offense for which Trump canned Bondi: her failure to score convictions against the president's perceived political enemies.
“He is looking for scalps but she hasn’t delivered,” the strategist explained. “She didn’t deliver the kind of results that the president was hoping for. She tried and didn’t succeed — and in Trump World that doesn’t fly.”
Trump infamously made a post to Truth Social last year, widely believed to have been meant as a direct message to Bondi, in which he pushed for faster movement on prosecutions for figures like former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James and Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff, all people the president perceived as his personal enemies. The Justice Department did ultimately manage to get grand jury indictments against Comey and James, but the cases fell apart due to a combination of prosecutorial flubs and the vindictive nature of the charges, made obvious by Trump's message to Bondi.
Legal experts have generally agreed that the cases against Trump had little merit and faced an uphill battle in court in the best-case scenario, with The Hill noting that these difficulties were, to a degree, insurmountable for Bondi.
"Trump’s critics have the slimmest sliver of sympathy with Bondi in that regard," the outlet explained. "They contend a vengeful president expected her to accomplish the impossible — securing guilty verdicts without clear and compelling evidence. But, they also note, she was an eager partner in that quest."
Another anonymous source, who worked in the DOJ during the early days of Trump's second term, also argued that Bondi's fate was sealed by a miscalculated publicity stunt in which she handed out binders labeled "Epstein Files" to conservative influencers at a White House event. The materials they contained had virtually no new information about deceased sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, angering the influencers with "binders full of nothingness," which the attorney general was said to have been closely involved with.
“She lost the office when she handed out the binders to the influencers,” this source explained. “You start off in a hole you dug for yourself.”
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